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Today’s Windows Developer faces a crucial decision: whether to build for the new (shiny!) Windows 8 Store or to build for the Desktop. There are significant advantages to each, and they are, more or less, mutually exclusive.

The point is I'm working to bring the 2 together so if Microsoft think they can lever people onto Modern UI only or WinRT only that just raises a further challenge for me to provide common development for both their old and new platforms. Platform lock-in is a bad thing whoever does it and not only if it's between platform suppliers. Microsoft put up a lot of barriers to platform portability already and I have knocked down all but a handful (64bit exception handling is still a mystery), a few more just makes the challenge more interesting.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

You may wonder why the title starts with "Basics". The answer is simple: I know only the basics of git rebase It's only one of the powerful features of git and it allows you to have a clean history in a highly branching workflow. "Rebase" is quite powerful as mentioned and what I'm about to show you is only one of the reasons why to use rebase.

CodeProject is the world’s largest independent community of coders and developers. But in early 2012, Sean Ewington, Jeff Hadfield, Chris Maunder, and Terrence Dorsey recognized three related areas in which they believed CodeProject was not living up to its full potential: helping women embrace programming in greater numbers, enter the industry, and find support within it. To that end, Maunder and David Cunningham decided to create an Advisory Board for Women in Technology.

Check out this profile of CodeProject's own Advisory Board for Women in Technology.

Unreal Engine 3, the game engine that runs fan favorites like Mass Effect, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade, has been ported to run inside a web browser without any plug-ins. Using JavaScript, specifically the asm.js sublanguage and Emscripten compiler, this engine can run on almost any modern web browser. While this is just a tech demo, it goes to show how the web browser is starting to become a completely valid native platform for games.

Overall, the challenges presented with C really forced me to think deeply about how I organized my code and interacted with the machine. Understanding that balance between bare-metal performance and human understandability definitely revealed the language's sweet spot. Even in an industry where older technologies are constantly rendered obsolete, that balance is the reason developers of major modern software projects continue to choose C for their implementation language.

With the recently leaked Windows Blue build out for the past few days, those downloading it are continuing to find new details as they dissect the code. While some of the early user-interface changes -- in some cases, making Windows Blue look and feel more like Windows Phone -- have been a big focus, the under-the-hood changes have gotten less coverage.... So what is MinKernel in this context? According to one of my sources, MinKernel is a minimal set of functionality that is shared across the different Windows kernels that run on x86, ARM, Windows Phone and Xbox. MinKernel is the one base-level implementation on top of which these platforms are built, the same way that BaseFS may be the base-level file system that is common across different platforms.

There were just SO MANY horrible scenes that I started thinking about how to even categorize them.... The state of technology portrayal in movies is frankly abysmal. It is obvious that the only people who know less about tech than “hollywood” are the people making laws about it. So, lets take a look at this list and see what we ended up with.

"It's a unix system I know this." and "The pool on the roof must have a leak."

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.-- Sarah Hoyt

Something Facebook mobile this way comes. And depending on what you read, it’s a little different here and there. A proper Facebook phone. Or not a Facebook phone, but a very Facebook-y version of a phone. Whatever it is, we’re in agreement that it involves Facebook and a phone. But let’s rewind for a second: Who among us would actually want to buy a Facebook phone, much less use it as a primary device?

For most people, there’s no point in getting a smartwatch yet, as all the options have major kinks that need ironing out. Skip this generation of them. But if you absolutely must have one because you have nothing better to spend your money on (impossible) grab a Pebble. Amidst a sea of buggy devices, ugly design, concepts that never ship, and problematic pairing, it only gets the nod because it’s less than ideal, but workable, whereas much of the competition simply does not work, or is priced by crazy people.

I keep wishing this Smart Watch revival was just an April Fool's joke. Sadly, no.

Secure Boot means different things to different people. I think the FSF's definition is a useful one - Secure Boot is any boot validation scheme in which ultimate control is in the hands of the owner of the device, while Restricted Boot is any boot validation scheme in which ultimate control is in the hands of a third party. What Microsoft require for x86 Windows 8 devices falls into the category of Secure Boot - assuming that OEMs conform to Microsoft's requirements, the user must be able to both disable Secure Boot entirely and also leave Secure Boot enabled, but with their own choice of trusted keys and binaries.

The problem: a growing number of modern devices restrict what you can boot (and run).

However I have never for one moment in my life actually wanted to write anything in JavaScript, especially not when I was writing JavaScript.

Anyone who doesn't know the difference between interpreted language and language open to interpretation shouldn't be writing a language or an interpretter and if they do noone should attempt to use it for anything other than unflattering comparisons with Malbolge.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)